So I was procrastinating coming up with a topic for my First Official Post by indulging a desire to figure out what happened to the parents of a cousin I’m researching when I found the above phrase. It’s funny what a faulty OCR reading of an early 20th century Swedish-American newspaper combined with Google Translate can do to the Swedish language. “Frid öfver hennes minne,” which roughly translates to “Peace be on her memory,” with one wrong letter becomes “Peace over her mips.” I guess if the letters are wrong Google Translate just starts guessing.

Just to fill you in on the rest of the story, I am currently researching Oscar Theodore Petersson Forsvall, a cousin whose great-grandfather is my 5-times-great-grandfather (Jonas Jonasson Holmberg of Byhult Södergård, Lekeryd, Jönköping, Sweden, 1747-1815). Oscar was the first of his family to emigrate, in 1881. His older sister, Christina, followed in 1887, and his parents, Peter Jonasson and Anna Catharina Jonasdotter, and his youngest sister Augusta, came in 1897. I am looking to find more evidence of his parents’ life in Texas after their emigration in 1897 at which time they were both 74 years old. I have evidence in the form of a passenger list of their departure from Göteborg on 18 August 1897, but I could find no evidence of them in census or cemetery records in Texas after that.

I was about to head out the door and start crawling around the three possible cemeteries that they could be in, which are all within 5 minutes of my house, but then I thought to look in the newspapers! One of my new favorite online haunts is the Minnesota Historical Society’s Swedish American Newspapers collection.

They have an extensive collection of the Texas Posten, Austin, Texas’ Swedish-American weekly newspaper, from 1898 – 1922. These are not all the years the paper published, but they do span a good number of years that my ancestors, et al. were active. I have been able to find a number of obituaries and other articles about family members, particularly in the 1890s, who I otherwise had very little information about (shakes fist at the fire gods who took the 1890 census).

Searching newspapers can be a frustrating, but often supremely rewarding, endeavor. The search algorithm doesn’t usually return very specific results. Unless you have a very unusual search term to use, the returns are usually a jumble of possibilities, many of which are just an instance of the surname you’re searching appearing in a list of names of those who maybe have a letter to pick up at the post office or something. But you have to look at every single one, because the one you decide to skip is the one that will contain the full column article about the murder trial of your 4-times-great-uncle who shot that guy and ran off to Missouri, or that mention of the Presbyterian minister named McClurkin who preached at your paternal great-great-grandfather Steele’s church in that little town in Pennsylvania. But those are stories for another day. And possibly another blog….

What I found today was one brief mention, in Chicago’s Svenska Amerikanaren, January 3, 1899, of the death of Peter Jonasson Forsvall, of Georgetown, Texas, 27 November 1898, 76 years old, from Lekeryd, Småland. If you’re feeling adventurous go ahead and click that link. He’s on page 7, right there in the fourth column, next to the advertisement for “Dr. Owens Elektriska Bälten.”

And I also found the very nice obituary, containing the quote for which this post is named, in the Texas Posten, for the widow Forsvall, who died on January 27, 1908, at the home of her daughter, Mrs Alfred Eklund, funeral services held at the Free Church in Brushy. Peace over her mips. (It’s on page 12, in the middle column right below the big header “Texas” if you’re curious.)

Now I will have to go look for their graves at the Free Church cemetery. Since the Georgetown Evangelical “Brushy” Free Church was founded in 1891, and the Eklunds were members, there’s a good chance Peter and Anna Catharina are there.

Note to self: figure out how to add footnotes to a blog post so that I can officially and properly cite the sources I’m using. Already spent more time on this than I intended today, but that is the definition of genealogy, at least in my world.

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